


to the skies

by paperfairies



Category: IT - Stephen King
Genre: M/M, Non-Chronological, mike watches stan and bill throughout the years
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-11
Updated: 2020-05-11
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:20:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,554
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24131212
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/paperfairies/pseuds/paperfairies
Summary: Mike watches Stan and Bill.
Relationships: Bill Denbrough/Stanley Uris, Mike Hanlon/Stanley Uris (one-sided)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 34





	to the skies

Bill and Beverly kiss at a lot of parties.

Under stairwells, where people part to avoid them. Lazily, on couches. Roughly, pushed up against the wall. In younger siblings’ bedrooms, where the glow-in-the-dark stars pressed onto the ceiling watch them.

The funny thing is, they aren’t like this at all when they’re sober. They don’t like to make a show of themselves, of what they have. But there are certain consequences to being lightweights that can’t handle their liquor, and by the time music is pounding and teenagers are flooding into the kitchen, they’re bound to be caught tangled up somewhere in a precarious position. Richie thinks that it’s hilarious. Eddie thinks it’s unimpressive and will unfailingly say something about “breeders” while Bill and Beverly blush and try to straighten out their clothing.

Mike doesn’t think much of it, only that Stan always looks put-out when they do.

When they were younger, they would go swimming in the quarry every Friday. It became a tradition of sorts to go all throughout September, just to soak up the last bits of summer. They would splash and play chicken fight and try to spot turtles through the murky, moss-colored water all afternoon until the sun began to droop.

Mike liked to look at Stan, then. He liked to see him shouting and laughing without restraint, to see his neatly combed hair unfurl into slow, spiraling curls. It was different from watching the Stan in his eighth-grade American history class, when he had perfect posture and perfect notes and kept his mouth shut. It was better.

The thing is, watching Stan meant, by default, watching Bill.

Bill and Stan would hoist themselves up onto sun-bathed shards of granite and rock hours before the sun came down, while the rest of them continued playing in the water. They would whisper secrets into each other’s ears with a kind of seriousness too old for people their age, as if they were charting maps along unknown waters. These maps, Mike realized, were to be burned, but it didn’t stop him from trying to decipher them. He tried to eavesdrop. He tried, and he tries, but he never learns any of the things they talk about. The Losers are best friends ー all of them are ーbut Stan and Bill are twin flames, tethered together in a way that he can’t understand.

Sometimes, Bill would make paper cranes out of old worksheets he found in his backpack, and they would race them across the water. Their soggy birds would be stained with ink and water-damaged and would get lost every time, but neither of them seemed to care.

“They’ll fly one day,” Stan shrugged.

“Hey, Stan.”

“Hey,” Stan offers him a small smile as he twists in his locker combination.

“So,” Mike begins, already trying to bite down a smile, “did you hear the news?”

Stan scoffs and flips his backpack to his front so that he can dig through it. “What? Richie finally got sent to juvie?”

“No! Bill and Beverly are like, a thing!”

Stan stares into his open backpack. The bell chimes. “Oh.”

Mike’s brow creases. “What’s wrong? Wait, did they already br--”

“No, it’s nothing,” Stan replies quickly, shoving a red binder into his locker and slamming his locker shut. “Sorry. I’ve gotta go. Physics on the other side of the building. Sorry. Sorry. Study group at four?”

“Sure,” Mike says carefully.

Stan smiles at him again, a disjointed version of the one he gave him earlier, and starts down the hall at a startling pace, despite the fact that their campus really isn’t that big.

Mike kneels down to tie his shoe. Only then does he see the little origami cranes that had fallen out of Stan’s locker.

He wakes up when the moon is still casting shadows across the floor and Richie’s room is still filled with soft snores and the smell of sleep. For a moment, he considers starting breakfast for the rest of the Losers, but instead closes his eyes and tries to coax himself back to sleep until a voice stretches across the darkness.

“Hey,” Bill whispers, “are you m-m-mad at me?”

He almost responds until he hears Stan shift beside him, clearly awake. “No, I’m not, Bill. Go to sleep.”

The sleeping bags rustle softly. Mike feels like he’s intruded on something intimate, something he’s not supposed to be hearing.

“You’re not talking to me. Everything is weird. Ever since I started… with Beverly.”

“Nothing is wrong,” Stan insists.

“Why can’t we just talk about it?”

“You know why.” His voice is muffled.

He hears the sleeping bag unzip. “Stanー”

Eddie groans fitfully in his sleep, cutting him off. He can hear the way Bill pauses as if they’re criminals caught red-handed in the act.

Stan waits for a beat, releasing his breath. “It doesn’t matter now.”

They don’t say anything else. Whatever was in the air between them has passed.

Mike doesn’t fall back asleep that night.

He watches Stan trace his finger over the formula scribbled into his notebook. “See? It’s okay if you forget the rest of the methods to solve quadratic equations. You can use this one every single time.”

Mike twists his pencil nervously. “But I used it on the worksheet, and I basically got half credit.”

Stan frowns, creasing the skin between his brows, and Mike almost reaches over to smooth it out. “Can I see it?”

He turns the page, carefully pushing down the embarrassment at his messy work, and points at the score. The furrow in Stan’s skin almost immediately disappears, and his lips purse in a terrible attempt to tamper down a smile.

“What?”

Stan rubs his jaw. “Wrong formula.”

The blood rushes to his face, and he quickly covers it with his palms. “Oh my god.”

Stan grins without restraint. He’s been doing that more often, now, Mike notices. “No worries. We’re almost there.”

“Now you’re just being mean, Stan,” Mike mutters into his hands. Stan laughs again, and this time he hears the librarian shush them. “See? Even Mrs. Scwartz thinks you’re being mean.”

Stan pokes his cheek where it’s being pushed up by a smile. “You know, only the best for you, Mike.”

Scarlet blooms across his cheeks again. It would be too easy to fall in love with someone like Stan.

Beverly is unaccompanied at the next house party. She veers away from the alcohol and instead claims the jacuzzi as their designated hangout spot, where she swims graceful little circles in four feet of water and braids strands of Richie’s hair. There’s a nasty bug going around, and Bill and Eddie were not spared. But while Eddie’s absence has Richie sulking in bubbles of chlorine and cigarettes from the convenience store, Beverly carries on bravely and tries to ease a few smiles from him. Ben, he notices, seems to have no qualms about Bill not being there.

Mike kicks his feet into the scalding water, watching the way the colorful lights in the hot tub make it look like his feet are being engulfed in neon. Beside him, Richie huffs restlessly and tries to detangle the knots in his hair.

“Come on, Rich, lighten up,” Beverly tries, but her attempts are futile.

“Can’t,” he replies, holding his cigarette between his teeth. “Besides, why are you so fucking perky? Aren’t you upset that Big Bill and his smaller Bill aren’t here at this fine establishment?”

She scoffs. “No, not in the state he’s in right now.”

“Do you know when Stan’s coming?” Mike asks. It’s too abrupt, too sudden, but they don’t seem to notice.

“Isn’t,” Richie responds nonchalantly, taking another melodramatic drag and flicking beads of water at Beverly. “He’s with Big Bill. Went to give him kosher soup or something, like a housewife. At this rate, our boy is gonna catch Bill’s crabs faster than Marsh.”

“Oh.”

“Stan’s smart. He won’t catch it,” Beverly says, kindly.

“Don’t worry, homeschool,” Richie adds, and this time, Beverly retaliates when he splashes her again. “I’m sure Stan will save some for you.”

The party goes on seamlessly in a whirl of splashing and commenting on how tasteless the music is. By the end of it, Richie is smiling again. Beverly always knows how to make people smile.

Mike isn’t smiling. Stan comes down with a virus the next week.

He gets an A- on his quadratics quiz and nearly sprints to the library to tell Stan.

“That’s-- that's great!” Stan beams. “Let’s see.”

He hands his quiz to him, and he nods approvingly. “I have done well.”

“Yeah,” Mike agrees, eyeing the chain of Post-It note paper birds lined up on Stan’s AP Biology textbook. They sit there, so silent and pretty and placid and carefully folded by Bill’s fingers, mocking him. Mocking him and his stupid score on his stupid quadratics quiz. “Thank you."

Bill starts coming to his study sessions with Stan. He says that he needs help with physics, which is a lazy excuse considering the fact that Stan isn’t even taking physics this year, but Stan lets him tag along. Wants him to.

 _They’re both so smart,_ Mike thinks as they discuss principles and long words that fly over his head. Not only that, but Stan’s paper bird collection grows in number and quality every day, and by now, it’s pointless for Bill to try to hide that he’s the one making them. Mike doesn’t understand it. He wants to be included, to be absorbed into them, but he can’t. He feels like he’s thirteen again, trying to peek at maps that they are charting and burning at the same time.

Mike stops going to the library. His algebra grade slips to a B and plateaus.

Freshman year homecoming, and Mike misses the slow dance.

He uses the bathroom at just the right moment and hears "Take My Breath Away" blasting from the speakers as he’s drying his hands. Honestly, he doesn’t mind, really, because none of the Losers have dates and won’t be doing any slow dancing unless Beverly drags Richie onto the dance floor and forces them to make fools of themselves. So he takes his time in the bathroom and then walks into the hall, anticipating hogging the snack bar with his friends while everybody else dances or waits to be asked to dance.

Instead, the dim lighting in the hallway reveals two figures swaying together slowly, blanketed by darkness.

At first, he thinks it’s Eddie and Richie. But then he sees the beat-up sneakers and slow curls and slender fingers around Bill’s waist, and he knows.

It’s almost sickly perverted, the way he watches Stan and Bill, watches his best friends dancing under the cover of night. He watches the easy way they move in tandem, the way their limbs are almost extensions of each other. Mike leans into the shadows and presses his back against the lockers so that they won’t see him, and his chest feels like it’s burning with pinpricks of pain, and he doesn’t know why.

The song ends, and Stan and Bill break apart immediately, laughing uneasily.

“S-s-so now you know how to dance with P-Patty,” Bill says, his voice more disjointed than usual.

“Right, right. Thanks.”

“You have,” Bill swallows and moves a strand of Stan’s hair away from his forehead, “there.”

"Time After Time" starts playing. Stan and Bill walk down the hallway and towards the gym together, leaving Mike alone in the darkness.

Setting: Richie’s seventeenth birthday, a sleepover. Part two.

He doesn’t want to sleep tonight. He waits in the darkness, waits for the exchange of voices, and the customary rustle of sleeping bags. It’s three in the morning, and the glow-in-the-dark stars pressed onto Richie’s ceiling are slowly lulling him to sleep with their dull flickering, and Mike hears fabric being unzipped carefully.

“138 more days until we’re out of here for good,” Stan says quietly, but his voice sounds different, like it’s laced with something like hope.

He hears more than sees Bill crawl into Stan’s sleeping bag and curl up beside him. “New York. NYU. We’re going to make it.”

“Stuttering Bill and Stan the Man. Richie won’t be able to handle it.”

Bill stifles his laugh into Stan’s shoulder. “I know he won’t.”

The stars on Richie’s ceiling twinkle back at him knowingly and blur together into splotches of silver against black in Mike’s vision. Bill and Stan’s stupid, stupid paper birds are making it to the skies, just like they’ve always wanted to.

When he was thirteen, he tried to make a paper bird for Stan, who was sick with the flu. It was creased in all the wrong spots, the paper sad and tired looking even though he had worked painstakingly on it for half an hour. The broken bird felt clumsy and uncertain in his hands ー not like the little ones Bill could make so effortlessly out of old assignments by the quarry. Mike’s bird was far from perfect, and the thought of Stan seeing it and assessing it with his eyes made his stomach churn, but he’d seen the way Stan smiled at Bill’s birds and wanted to replicate that.

So on a damp, rainy day, he biked over to the Uris household house with his heart in his hands and plastic bags on his boots so that he wouldn’t stain the carpet. Stan looked grey and exhausted, and not wanting to intrude any more than he already had, Mike dug the crumpled bird out of his backpack and placed it on Stan’s lap. It was tired and sorry, almost like a mirror of Stan himself.

His eyes had brightened. “Did Bill make this?”

His eyes had looked so bright. It hurt to look at him for too long. It was painful to orbit close to the sun.

“Yeah,” Mike lied and stared at the paper crane he had spent so much time on. “He wanted me to give it to you.”

Stan delicately held the bird up to the cool light leaking through his window, and his lips quirked up. “He’s never made one like this before.”

“Maybe it got a little messed up in the rain. Sorry.”

“No, no. That’s alright,” Stan said, pushing the bird between two identical paper doves on his nightstand. It looked gawkish and out of place shoved between them. He turned to Mike and grinned properly, the dimple in his cheek popping out. “You’re the best, Mike.”

Outside, thunder boomed.

Stan never learns who the bird was from, and Mike doesn’t attempt to make him another one.

“Bill and I broke up,” Beverly tells him one afternoon as they lazily ride their bikes home after school. Spring is slowly inching forward (along with graduation), gradually seeping its way back into the earth with tulips that turn their noses up to the sun and the kind of muggy weather that makes you want to tear your skin off. “Did you hear that?”

He pretends that he doesn’t know anything. That he doesn’t know about NYU. That he doesn’t know that this is day 43. “How are you doing?”

She sighs. “Fine, I guess. It was gonna happen inevitably, with him going off to some fancy writing college while I… whatever.”

“You wanna talk about it and get cookie dough ice cream?” he offers.

“They only have that on the other side of town. And besides, you told me today is going to be hell on the farm.” Beverly pouts in mock sadness. “It sucks, but I’m not that devastated.”

“Bev, I think any mild inconvenience calls for cookie dough ice cream. Even Bill,” he adds.

A sad smile stretches across her face, and it makes his ribs turn over painfully. Almost four years. “I love you, Mike.”

“I love you, too,” he says, and he means it.

June closes in with vengeance.

On day 21, Stan watches Mike half-heartedly run football drills from the bleachers even though Mike knows well that Stan has class. He almost looks comical, looking mildly disgusted by the violence of football practice and perched awkwardly on the edge of a metal seat that hasn’t been cleaned in years. Football season is long over, but Mike likes the repetition. It’s something he can hold onto, something that remains constant while everything else seems to change.

“I’m sorry that I never came to any of your games,” Stan tells him afterward. “And now they’re done.”

Mike takes a careless swig from his water bottle, and drops trickle down his chin. “It’s okay, really. We aren’t very good. And besides, you guys aren’t really into that kind of stuff.”

Stan pauses. “No one ever came?” It doesn’t sting as much as he’d expected it to.

“No. But Bev came after and brought pizza sometimes,” he shrugs. “It was nice.”

Stan looks ahead, at the pitiful, dehydrated grass, instead of looking at Mike. “God, that’s such... I'm sorry. We’re shitty friends.”

They’re a lot of things, but they aren’t shitty friends. They’re the best friends he’ll ever have.

“No, you’re a good friend. We’re just different. And you,” he swallows, craning his neck to look at the sky, overwhelmingly blue. There is no cutting, icy undertone to this blue. No menace. This sky is promising, forgiving. A perfect Raphael sky. “All of you get to leave.”

“You don’t have to stay in Derry, Mike. You can leave with u--” he hears Stan’s voice catch but doesn’t let his gaze waver from the sky, “I mean, with me.”

His words are empty. A flock of birds flies against the tender streaks of white in the sky, and their wings beat like a semaphore. He wonders what they’re trying to tell him. Mike pushes himself off the bleachers. “I don’t think Bill would like that very much.”

There are two kinds of people that grow up in Derry-- the ones that get out and the ones that don’t. The ones that fly and the ones that stay tethered to the ground. Mike has long since accepted that he is the latter. The earth never trembles under his feet. The ground doesn’t propel him into the sun. The skies don’t open up for him. But seeing that wedding invitation lying in his stupid, old mailbox, the same mailbox he's had since he was seven, makes him want to sprout wings and fly, just once.

The wedding is beautiful.

Stan and Bill are beautiful.

The reception is decorated with paper birds in shapes of silver and white. They fly above the bobbing heads on the dance floor, above Richie sweeping Eddie into tango and Ben and Beverly’s terrible dancing. They fly above Stan and Bill whispering amongst themselves, charting maps along unknown waters without burning them. They fly above Mike, sitting at the table alone and drinking flat champagne, and remind him of what he can’t have.

Greta Keene’s basement, after his senior homecoming game.

He and Beverly are stripped down to their underwear because she managed to destroy their clothing in an unfortunate Easy Cheese accident, and they’re dancing to Echo and the Bunnymen and pretending to know all the lyrics. Beverly’s hair has grown past her shoulders, and it sticks to the sheen of sweat on her neck as she spins circles around him. Every so often, she passes him the bottle of vodka that they’re sharing, and Mike takes a drink. Usually, he hates drinking in public spaces, but it’s just the two of them, the rest of the party having migrated upstairs, and he likes it better that way.

They collapse on the floor afterward, drowsy and still half-dressed, and stare at the patterns on the ceiling that drift in and out of focus.

“Mike,” she says as Ian McColloch rambles about being the puppet, “I’m going to ask you something.”

He turns to her because the ceiling is making his head spin. She is beautiful, even with eyeliner streaking down her face. “Hm?”

“Are you in love with Stan?”

A pro: the alcohol relaxes him, makes everything fuzzy at the edges, takes the weight out of the question. He doesn’t freeze, but he doesn’t respond.

“Here,” she offers, fumbling between them until she slips her cold hand into his. “Squeeze once for yes, twice for no.”

“Okay.” He doesn’t know why his voice seems stuck in his throat. This is a bad idea.

“Are you in love with Stan?” she tries again.

A con: The alcohol makes him honest.

He squeezes her hand.

Mike is twenty-nine, and his bags are packed into his truck.

Mike is twenty-nine, and he is almost out of Derry until he stops and pulls over on the side of the road.

The quarry is just as he remembered it, reeking of dirt and waste but still oddly charming. It welcomes him as it did when he was a child one last time.

Mike sits on the sun-soaked rocks that Stan and Bill used to conquer and folds a single paper bird from the author’s notes of a library book. His bird is uneven and clumsy, but he never was as good at making them as Bill.

He sends the bird across the water, watching the tiny ripples it makes on the surface.

“They’ll fly one day,” Stan used to say.

**Author's Note:**

> hiiii please leave comments or constructive criticism!! thank you sm for reading; i really appreciate it :,)


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